“I want to astonish Paris with an apple,” the famous French post-impressionist/modernist painter once said.

As you’ll learn from the special exhibit “The World is an Apple: The Still Lifes of Paul Cézanne” at the Barnes Foundation, it wasn’t uttered out of conceit, but rather out of contempt for the bourgeois art tastemakers of his day.

With a playful and skewed senses of perspective; unconventional approaches to color, form and brushwork; and looking at inanimate objects as if they had a soul, the painter from Aix-en-Provence was a maverick when he arrived in Paris in the 1860s.

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At a media preview for “The World is an Apple,” the Barnes’ senior director of conservation, Barbara Buckley, singled out the still life “Three Apples” and contrasted it with an 1875 Pierre-Auguste Renoir apple still life. While Renoir, an impressionist, treated his subject as “soft and sensual,” Cézanne’s painting from 1878-79 renders that same fruit as solid and having depth, she said.

“It’s a matter of understanding how he worked ... how he’s trying to achieve the goals he set for himself,” Buckley said.

Mostly panned during his lifetime (1839-1906) for employing a technique some described as “willful ineptitude,” Cézanne specialized in still lifes — considered among the lowest forms of art by French art academics — painting some 300 of them during his career.

Although artist Edouard Manet was ambivalent about Cézanne’s talent, he conceded that his still lifes were “powerfully treated.”

Twenty-one of these still lifes — depicting favorite subjects like fruit, flowers and skulls — from public and private collections in America, France, Hungary and Switzerland have been curated by Dr. Benedict Leca of the Art Gallery of Hamilton in Ontario, Canada for “The World is an Apple.” The Barnes will be the only U.S. venue to show it.

During the media preview, Leca pointed out the resemblance “Apples and Cakes” has to a landscape painting. Of “Still Life with Seven Apples and a Tube of Paint,” which has areas of canvas deliberately left unpainted, he said: “When your process is visible, it’s like a self portrait.”

“Sugar Bowl, Pears and Blue Cup” is a standout in the exhibit, with its pitch black background, use of “acidic” colors and the spackled texture of the paint from the artist’s use of a palette knife. The artist later worked the painting into the background of a portrait of his father, which is in the National Gallery of Art.

To Cézanne, the rounded forms of skulls became as fascinating to him as apples, especially after his mother died in 1897 and he starting contemplating his own mortality. One can only imagine how disturbed visitors to his studio may have become upon discovering skulls lined up on a table. “The Three Skulls” from the Detroit Institute of Arts, “Three Skulls on a Patterned Carpet” from Switzerland’s Kunstmuseum Solothurn, and the graphite-and-watercolor “Skull on a Drapery” from a private collection are a part of “The World is an Apple.”

“It’s loaded thematically for him, but like the apple, it’s a ready-made prop for him to play with,” said Leca.

When Philadelphia businessman Albert C. Barnes starting collecting Cézanne paintings in 1912, many thought he was throwing his money away. Barnes, who established the Barnes Foundation in 1922 near his home in Merion, said that he liked Cézanne’s “crudity.”

“Then the tide turns in the ’30s [when Cézanne becomes popular], and then he’s [Barnes] a visionary,” said Judith Dolkart, the Barnes Foundation’s deputy director of art and archival collections and Gund Family chief curator.

When he bought the large Cézanne painting “The Card Players” in 1925, Barnes communicated with the dealer by telegram in coded messages. That’s one of the fascinating tidbits you get on the newly spruced-up audio tours of the Barnes’ permanent collection, which has 69 Cézannes hanging in its gallery spaces, in addition to what’s on view in the exhibition. The tours also offer insight into Barnes’ sense of presentation.

To appreciate Cézanne’s mastery, it’s important to see how he approaches portraits, such as those of his wife, and landscapes, like the “bathers” paintings and works like “The Farm at Jas de Bouffan.” You can also check out related talks, programs, performances and family activities scattered throughout the exhibit’s run.

The permanent collection also includes 181 works by Renoir, seven van Goghs, six Georges Seurat paintings, 59 works by Henri Matisse and 46 assorted pieces by Pablo Picasso.